3.14.2006

Body Count

It's not just today's news that over 80 bodies were found in Baghdad (victims of "sectarian" violence, car bombs, etc. and many of them bearing signs of torture) that upsets me. It's another story I read a couple weeks ago on the BBC web site that quoted a UN official estimating the number of bodies brought in every month to the Baghdad mortuary: between 780 and 1110 corpses, every month for the last year. Three-fourths of them "showed signs of extrajudicial death," and two-thirds or more showed signs of torture or "death by deliberate gunshot." That's a lot of bodies, and a lot of gruesome, unexplained deaths—and it's important to remember that Iraq only has something like 26 million people to begin with. The United States has 300 million people, and lots of Americans are rightly upset about our 2500 seemingly needless deaths in Iraq. Can you imagine if a comparable number of Americans died unexplained deaths by torture or execution? My calculations lead me to a rough estimate of that being something like 115,000 people. Can you imagine that? I can't.

Editing Note: This post was written and published via Writely, the new Google tool for word processing on the web, and it completely, utterly rocks! I know Google's taking over the world one consciousness at a time, but if Googlife is as seamlessly integrated as this, I'm cool with it!

Don't look at me! I didn't vote for Bush. I was never supportive of the War in Iraq. Now people are pissed that things aren't going so well. What do people think happens in a war? It's not a tea party. Most of the world thinks America is dumb and is probably making fun of us. I ask you this. Why are we fuddling in Iraq and yet O'sama goat man is running around laughing at us? I just don't care anymore.